Designs

"Architectonic," a showcase of designs by furniture maker Michael Wilson and ceramist Yassi Mazandi, opened this week at JF Chen in Los Angeles. Both artists coax improbable, intricate shapes and surfaces out of their materials. Wilson's laminated wood constructions include two sculptural tables -- one that looks like a tarantula and another that resembles a splash of water with shark fins rising from the top.

On one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, Marwa Atik chose a crowded Southern California mosque to debut her latest creation. It was just after midnight when the 20-year-old walked into the Islamic Center of Irvine, dressed in a long, flowing burgundy robe, her head wrapped in a charcoal-colored chiffon hijab , trimmed with decorative gold zippers. After the group prayers, sermon and Koran recitation, a woman approached Atik, gesturing at the scarf. "OK, I want one," she said excitedly.

Despite the chicken-in-every-pot hype over consumer-level 3-D printers, the technology still has a long way to go to be usable, or useful, for the average Joe. Designing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional computer screen is no simple task, especially for those unskilled in computer-assisted design or software. And for most people, there's no compelling reason to make a unique object from scratch when mass-produced equivalents are cheaper and simpler. But for some artists, 3-D printing has been a revelation.

The gig: Weili Dai, 51, is co-founder of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Marvell Technology Group LTD, among the world's five largest "fabless" semiconductor companies. Fabless means the company designs chips that other people build. A software engineer by background, Dai started the company in 1995 with her husband, Sehat Sutardja, a chip designer. Today, Sutardja serves as chairman and CEO, while Dai is vice president and general manager of communications and consumer business. In practice, however, Dai serves as the official public face of the company while helping chart strategy for Marvell, which designs chips that power digital storage products, mobile devices and, increasingly, smart TVs. Pushing women in engineering: A native of Shanghai who moved with her family to the U.S. as a girl, Dai has also become a leading advocate of increasing the number of women in engineering jobs and corporate leadership positions.

Alix Soubiran could live quite happily without a stick of furniture. "A chair can be wonderful, but walls are what you see all the time," she says. "To me, walls that create a story or a mood are the starting point. " As a muralist, Soubiran is accustomed to using walls as a blank canvas. But she recently began experimenting with decorating techniques, creating a line of high-end wallpapers called Princes & Crows. Inspired by her memories of her native France, those designs have helped to transform a ramshackle 1923 duplex in Los Feliz into the charming home she shares with husband Joe Mauceri, a film and TV director and writer, and their 61/2-month-old daughter, Monica Moonshine.

The NBBJ Sports & Entertainment architecture firm already has designed stadiums in Seattle and Cincinnati. Now, it has won the contract for a sports project only 10 blocks from its downtown Los Angeles headquarters--the proposed 20,000-seat sports arena at Figueroa and 11th streets. "We want to create a new icon for downtown Los Angeles," Dan Meis, NBBJ's design principal, said Friday, shortly after the arena developers announced that the architecture firm had landed the contract.

Penelope Cruz has two contender films this season. Does that mean more red carpet gowns? Her adept portrayal of Javier Bardem's psychotically sexy ex in Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" has already earned her a supporting actress Golden Globe nomination. And there's a smattering of buzz that her surprisingly layered turn as a student who becomes the erotic obsession of an infamous womanizer professor-literary critic (Ben Kingsley) in "Elegy" may also earn her an Oscar nod.

Angie Myung's and Ted Vadakan's dreams of having careers in the arts hit them right in the wallet. In a good way. The Los Angeles couple own Poketo, a company they started in 2004 to put emerging artists' designs on inexpensive wallets. They call it an "affordable art" company, and there's money in that, even for the small operation they run out of a downtown loft with just one full-time and three part-time employees. Poketo had more than $500,000 in sales last year, Vadakan said.

March 13, 2012 | By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

I may not be a fashionista, but I wear clothes as often as the next person — I'm wearing some right now as a matter of fact. And stung into curiosity by that withering monologue about the cerulean blue sweater in "The Devil Wears Prada," I am interested in how certain styles wind up dominating major commercial outlets like Macy's, H&M and Saks Fifth Avenue. What I am not interested in is another reality program in which a carefully selected group of poignantly back-storied and teary-eyed "up 'n comers" attempt to leapfrog the traditional rigors of their craft to win a competition guaranteeing them a contract.

"Does it trouble you, Mikhail Timofeyevich, that your creation has killed so many people around the world?" The kind-eyed old gentleman had heard the question before. Clearly, he has even put it to himself at times, in those long winters hidden away in the Russian heartland. "All I can say," he replied, "is that terrorists would have found something else to kill people with, even if there weren't my Kalashnikovs." Forget Clinton. Forget Yeltsin. Forget Marx and Mohammed.